Professor Alan Barrett:

Let me put it like this. The ESRI's engagement with these sort of things tends to be at the micro level, where one is looking at individual tax expenditures. One of the things that has struck me is that the Department of Finance has considerably upped its game in this area. For many years, there were all sorts of expenditure appraisal formalities around current and capital expenditure, but tax expenditures went beneath the radar. There was a greater recognition in the 2000s of the effect that some of the property reliefs were having distributionally - who was benefitting from them and what the actual impact of such things was. The Department redesigned things and got into a much stronger zone in terms of the appraisal. This is where the ESRI engagement would have been. It would have been topic by topic. I am open to correction on this but my understanding of this is that much of the tax expenditures, particularly in the property area, were phased out over time. There are a few remaining headline ones. Is it fair to say that the biggest tax expenditure is the pension relief?